I'm on strike this week. My union, UCU, has called eight days of strike action over pensions (at many universities, not mine as we didn't reach the ridiculously high 50% turnout threshold), pay, workload, equality, and casualisation. Around 50% of staff are on precarious contracts, there's a 30% ethnicity promotion gap, we're working an average of 2 free days per week (much more for part time staff), and pay has fallen in real terms by 15% in the last ten years. The corporatisation of Higher Education has meant universities chase more and more students but the resources aren't there to teach them. My class sizes are two-thirds bigger than when I started teaching, and I'm not even that old.
Some people think we don't care about students, if we strike. Colleagues who don't strike may say they couldn't, because they care about students too much. Managers may say that we shouldn't, if we care about students. I know colleagues whose main role is to deal with students in need; I too would think twice about striking if that were the case for me, because the consequences for those students might be too harmful. But to say that we don't care about our students couldn't be further from the truth. We hate doing this. Everyone feels horrible about the effect it could have, and that it should not be the students who should suffer. But the fact is that we can't do anything else, and the students themselves understand that and have clearly shown their support (not least the amazing student union members who brought us tea and coffee!). And remember that we don't get paid. We're not being selfish; we're losing a lot more money than many of think we are realistically likely to gain. But if there is a chance we can change things, we have to try, and we have to show that we do care, to send a clear message that we cannot go on like this.
And I do love my job. I miss it. I'm looking forward to going back on Thursday. It's a genuine effort to not do work on strike days. I'm lucky in that respect, and I do appreciate it. I'm glad to have the job, and know that I'm in a fortunate position. But lots of my colleagues do the same job as me for a fraction of the pay. My students deserve more people like me - on a relatively secure contract, able to put in the time their education deserves because I don't have to constantly apply for another position or work another job to make ends meet. They deserve to see a world where they can succeed if they aren't a middle class white man. They deserve a good education, not to buy a degree that meets the requirements.
Tuesday, 3 December 2019
Tuesday, 19 November 2019
The universal taxi
I was listening to the radio this morning and they were talking about linguistics. I feel very conflicted about this because I love hearing real, proper linguistics on the radio! It's so rare! but the linguist in question has expressed anti-trans attitudes in the recent past and so I can't call myself a fan. But there we go; they at least weren't discussing such issues so they didn't express them in the course of this conversation.
They were talking about demonstratives, this and that. It was a nice discussion, lots of information, and fun facts about proximal and distal demonstratives (this here vs that there) and how these change in context, and also how many languages have a three-way system with a medium-distance and a far-distance one.
And finally they talked about how pronouns are universal: all languages have them. This is indeed super cool, and basically indicates that they are a Very Important and Useful language feature. Any language that didn't have them for some reason would likely innovate them pretty sharpish, and home signs include them, for instance.
Then someone wrote in to say that 'Interestingly, one word that is universal is 'taxi''. This is interesting, but it's not the same thing. Taxi is 'universal' because it's been borrowed into lots of languages. I'd actually be surprised if it's truly universal in the sense that every single language has this word. There are presumably a few where the concept hasn't been needed and lots more where in fact there's a different word meaning 'private car and driver hired for single journeys', or whatever it is that taxi means. A quick google looks like in quite a lot of languages familiar to English speakers, the word for 'taxi' is something like taxi, which does give an impression of universality from this vantage point. And the 'universal' part is the specific form of the word ('taxi'), with a certain meaning.
Pronouns are universal in a different way. The words are not the same in every language (me, your, we, etc). They haven't been borrowed. There is a lot of historical relatedness, to be sure; it's no coincidence that we looks like German wir. But the very fact that there are pronouns is what's universal. This is fundamentally more interesting than that a particular word has been borrowed a lot. (By the way, here is a study that says that the most universal word is 'huh'.)
They were talking about demonstratives, this and that. It was a nice discussion, lots of information, and fun facts about proximal and distal demonstratives (this here vs that there) and how these change in context, and also how many languages have a three-way system with a medium-distance and a far-distance one.
And finally they talked about how pronouns are universal: all languages have them. This is indeed super cool, and basically indicates that they are a Very Important and Useful language feature. Any language that didn't have them for some reason would likely innovate them pretty sharpish, and home signs include them, for instance.
Then someone wrote in to say that 'Interestingly, one word that is universal is 'taxi''. This is interesting, but it's not the same thing. Taxi is 'universal' because it's been borrowed into lots of languages. I'd actually be surprised if it's truly universal in the sense that every single language has this word. There are presumably a few where the concept hasn't been needed and lots more where in fact there's a different word meaning 'private car and driver hired for single journeys', or whatever it is that taxi means. A quick google looks like in quite a lot of languages familiar to English speakers, the word for 'taxi' is something like taxi, which does give an impression of universality from this vantage point. And the 'universal' part is the specific form of the word ('taxi'), with a certain meaning.
Pronouns are universal in a different way. The words are not the same in every language (me, your, we, etc). They haven't been borrowed. There is a lot of historical relatedness, to be sure; it's no coincidence that we looks like German wir. But the very fact that there are pronouns is what's universal. This is fundamentally more interesting than that a particular word has been borrowed a lot. (By the way, here is a study that says that the most universal word is 'huh'.)
Monday, 30 September 2019
He said she said
Normally when I read a China Miéville novel, I blog or tweet the whole way through because the language he uses is so exciting and lovely. True to form, I read The Scar recently and I have Thoughts.
The leaders of the city Armada are The Lovers, a couple (one male, one female) whose names we never learn. They're both simply referred to as The Lovers when they're talked about as a couple, or The Lover when they're referred to alone. The image below, of p.731 from my copy, is typical of the way they are described.
Each of the two Lovers speaks in turn, the man first, and then the woman. Here's the relevant bit from the first part, where he speaks (you can tell because the male pronoun 'he' is used):
These expressions include as part of their meaning the notion of uniqueness. Using the implies that there is only one of the thing you're referring to, or at least only one in the relevant context. So if there's more than one, like with the girls example, you have to add in something that makes each the only one (like the first girl), so that the two referring expressions refer to different things. In the Lovers example, there is just one referring expression and so it should refer to just one unique thing. But it doesn't; it refers to either of the two Lovers. Without making any concession by saying, for instance, the male Lover, Miéville flouts this expectation of uniqueness, creating a very unsettling effect.
The leaders of the city Armada are The Lovers, a couple (one male, one female) whose names we never learn. They're both simply referred to as The Lovers when they're talked about as a couple, or The Lover when they're referred to alone. The image below, of p.731 from my copy, is typical of the way they are described.
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| Image of p.731 of The Scar, with dialogue of each Lover speaking in turn. |
'Many of those who are dead,' the Lover began... and in that way... he continued.And then the female Lover speaks, which you can tell because of the female pronoun 'her':
'We are very close,' the Lover said, and an edge of excitement crept into her voice.The interesting thing about it is the way that Miéville doesn't make any distinction between the two Lovers' names beyond using the relevant pronouns where appropriate. The Lover is what we call an R-expression, or referring expression. It's a definite noun phrase and it works basically just like a name. Imagine that you had two people called Billie speaking in a dialogue. You'd differentiate between them by using maybe the initial of their surname, like 'Billie J began... Billie C responded...'. Or if you were talking about two girls chatting, you'd say 'The first girl said... the other girl replied...'.
These expressions include as part of their meaning the notion of uniqueness. Using the implies that there is only one of the thing you're referring to, or at least only one in the relevant context. So if there's more than one, like with the girls example, you have to add in something that makes each the only one (like the first girl), so that the two referring expressions refer to different things. In the Lovers example, there is just one referring expression and so it should refer to just one unique thing. But it doesn't; it refers to either of the two Lovers. Without making any concession by saying, for instance, the male Lover, Miéville flouts this expectation of uniqueness, creating a very unsettling effect.
Thursday, 26 September 2019
Pope Francis says no adjectives; I'm going to hell
If you like to take your grammar advice from authority, you'll enjoy the fact that Pope Francis has decreed that we shouldn't use adjectives. Specifically, he has said that his communications team shouldn't use adjectives. He twote thus:
Let us learn to call people by their name, as the Lord does with us, and to give up using adjectives.And in a speech, he said:
The communicator must make people understand the weight of the reality of nouns that reflect the reality of people. And this is a mission of communication: to communicate with reality, without sweetening with adjectives or adverbs.He didn't use adjectives to say this, either, impressively. I'm trying not to use adjectives in this blog post and I think I've succeeded so far, with difficulty. So much difficulty, in fact, that I'm stopping now, with the observation that you shouldn't take the Pope's advice on this or probably anything else.
Tuesday, 17 September 2019
Croiffle: The verdict
On my way home from the Linguistics Association of Great Britain annual meeting last week, this advert on the train (too late, I was already on my way to Kent at this point) offered me a free speciality coffee with purchase of their new 'croiffle'.
A croiffle?, you might ask. And what is a croiffle? Using my linguistic skills, honed over the course of the last fifteen years of intensive linguistic training, I intuited that it is a croissant of some kind (see image) with something unspeakable done to it. Obviously this is a blend, or portmanteau, of croissant and, I assume, waffle, as it's apparently been toasted in a waffle machine. Why you would do this, I do not know.
But how do you pronounce it? While I and a friend both went with the vowel of croissant (slightly different for each of us, with his being more similar to the French than mine (/ɒ/ vs /ʌ/)), another friend said it as she saw it and used the oi of, well, Oi!. And a portmanteau that no one knows how to pronounce is an unsuccessful new word, especially if it's also just a toasted croissant that's a bit bumpy.
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| Advert offering a free coffee if you buy a 'croiffle' |
But how do you pronounce it? While I and a friend both went with the vowel of croissant (slightly different for each of us, with his being more similar to the French than mine (/ɒ/ vs /ʌ/)), another friend said it as she saw it and used the oi of, well, Oi!. And a portmanteau that no one knows how to pronounce is an unsuccessful new word, especially if it's also just a toasted croissant that's a bit bumpy.
Tuesday, 3 September 2019
Spotting a fake
Fake news is big news these days. Mostly, it's in the context of Donald Trump complaining about it, or alternatively being supported by it. There are millions of fake twitter accounts all tweeting away in support of something or other, or to try and scam something. Last week, Marc Owen Jones described his lengthy relationship with someone who was probably not who he claimed to be:
This is something that you'd think linguists ought to be good at. It's something that linguists sometimes end up working in, at least: forensic linguistics is the analysis of texts to detect or solve crimes, and it's all about looking for (in)consistencies, patterns and giveaways in the text to tell you who did or didn't write it. Therefore, linguists have turned their hand to various genres of fake news, reviews and tweets to determine how we can spot them. (I should note, you do need a postgraduate qualification to work in these areas, and/or experience - you don't just magically learn how to do it by being a linguist in general.)
The best I've done is with these emails that have been arriving lately, the kind that look like they come from someone you know. In my case, it's nearly always either David Adger or my Head of School, because I think they pick on someone who sounds like they're senior to you, and then the email says something like 'Are you free? I need a favour urgently'. But they're on to a loser here, because at the very least, I can recognise the writing style of people I know. I also know that these highly educated people would not make the kinds of mistakes that these emails contain, even if they were typing in the midst of great angst and favour-needing. Their emails might be short, lacking capitalisation, or be sentence fragments, but they wouldn't have odd exclamation marks, strange spacing or ungrammatical wording.
I tried a quiz recently to see if I could tell which product reviews were real and which were fake; I did terribly, no better than chance. I had read that you might see too many technical details in fake ones, superlatives, or lack of personal detail, and still I couldn't pick the fake from the real. It's actually put me off online shopping a bit.[Thread] As promised, today I want to tell you of how I became friends with a Twitter troll called Angus Gallagher. Angus recently had a sex/ethnicity reassignment operation. He is now called Jasmine, but we'll come to that a bit later. First though, say hi to Angus #StopTheCoup pic.twitter.com/z9cjTZxkxo— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) August 31, 2019
This is something that you'd think linguists ought to be good at. It's something that linguists sometimes end up working in, at least: forensic linguistics is the analysis of texts to detect or solve crimes, and it's all about looking for (in)consistencies, patterns and giveaways in the text to tell you who did or didn't write it. Therefore, linguists have turned their hand to various genres of fake news, reviews and tweets to determine how we can spot them. (I should note, you do need a postgraduate qualification to work in these areas, and/or experience - you don't just magically learn how to do it by being a linguist in general.)
The best I've done is with these emails that have been arriving lately, the kind that look like they come from someone you know. In my case, it's nearly always either David Adger or my Head of School, because I think they pick on someone who sounds like they're senior to you, and then the email says something like 'Are you free? I need a favour urgently'. But they're on to a loser here, because at the very least, I can recognise the writing style of people I know. I also know that these highly educated people would not make the kinds of mistakes that these emails contain, even if they were typing in the midst of great angst and favour-needing. Their emails might be short, lacking capitalisation, or be sentence fragments, but they wouldn't have odd exclamation marks, strange spacing or ungrammatical wording.
Monday, 29 July 2019
Practice is nicer than practise
This exchange appeared in my facebook the other day. I don't know any of the people involved, and as always, I'm just commenting interestedly, not making fun or criticising them.
The image shows a conversation in response to someone mentioning 'practicing', with that spelling. Assuming that things haven't changed since I learnt this, that's a valid spelling in American English. British English would traditionally prefer 'practice' for the noun (as in We went to practice tonight) and 'practise' for the verb (as in Are we practising tonight?). In practice (ha!) this is very variable and it's probably one of those things that's on the way out really, and both spellings can do both jobs.
What interested me about the above, though, is that even though 2 out of the 3 people having this discussion obviously care about this spelling rule (otherwise they wouldn't be discussing it), they don't seem to be very clear on which it should be.
Person 1 says 'practicing with a c, though' indicating that they know it's spelt incorrectly, and sharing a link to that effect. Person 2 doesn't really notice the spelling comment (unless I'm missing some more subtle joke?) and comments on the content of the original post, spelling it with an 's' for both the noun and the verb (Some sides don't practise [verb] wilst half drunk, so it could well be 'intoxicated dance practise [noun]' for a newbie...). Then Person 3 brings it back to spelling and quotes the rule, presumably in response to Person 2 as much as the OP, to which Person 1 replies, agreeing, and saying I think it's nicer to think of it as morris 'practice' rather than 'practise'. I realise it's incorrect :).
But it's not incorrect! Both spellings are right depending on which 'morris practi{c/s}e' is intended (noun or verb). And here, the commenter is probably actually correct, because with the pre-modifying 'morris', it is far more likely to be the noun, so 'practice' is the right spelling to use.
And – most baffling – why is it 'nicer to think' of it with a 'c'??
The image shows a conversation in response to someone mentioning 'practicing', with that spelling. Assuming that things haven't changed since I learnt this, that's a valid spelling in American English. British English would traditionally prefer 'practice' for the noun (as in We went to practice tonight) and 'practise' for the verb (as in Are we practising tonight?). In practice (ha!) this is very variable and it's probably one of those things that's on the way out really, and both spellings can do both jobs.
What interested me about the above, though, is that even though 2 out of the 3 people having this discussion obviously care about this spelling rule (otherwise they wouldn't be discussing it), they don't seem to be very clear on which it should be.
Person 1 says 'practicing with a c, though' indicating that they know it's spelt incorrectly, and sharing a link to that effect. Person 2 doesn't really notice the spelling comment (unless I'm missing some more subtle joke?) and comments on the content of the original post, spelling it with an 's' for both the noun and the verb (Some sides don't practise [verb] wilst half drunk, so it could well be 'intoxicated dance practise [noun]' for a newbie...). Then Person 3 brings it back to spelling and quotes the rule, presumably in response to Person 2 as much as the OP, to which Person 1 replies, agreeing, and saying I think it's nicer to think of it as morris 'practice' rather than 'practise'. I realise it's incorrect :).
But it's not incorrect! Both spellings are right depending on which 'morris practi{c/s}e' is intended (noun or verb). And here, the commenter is probably actually correct, because with the pre-modifying 'morris', it is far more likely to be the noun, so 'practice' is the right spelling to use.
And – most baffling – why is it 'nicer to think' of it with a 'c'??
Monday, 15 July 2019
Fusilli bolognese
I had the good fortune to be on a train full of children, maybe about nine or ten years old, the other day. I mean, literally full, there were two of them in the seat next to me.
They were off on a residential visit somewhere so meals were involved, so they started talking about their various fussy eating foibles. One said she couldn't eat steak, to which the teacher responded with admirable restraint 'It's OK, we're not having steak'.
Another was alarmed when she heard one of the meals would be spaghetti bolognese (or 'skabetti', as the teacher called it, which I always find an adorable pronunciation), because she doesn't like spaghetti. Fortunately for her, it turned out that the spaghetti to be used was in fact fusilli (the spiral one), which she did like. For me, spaghetti is specifically the long, thin, solid, cylindrical ones, and any other pasta shape has to be called by its own name (or just 'pasta'). But spag bol is special, because it's the pasta meal most British people encountered first, so it's kind of a meal in itself. I'm not quite sure how to describe its cultural role, actually, for people that don't already have the same cultural knowledge of it. I mean, Heinz sells it in tins, is probably the most meaningful thing I can tell you about it. So I suppose for her, spaghetti isn't a thing in its own right and it could be used as the generic term for pasta as long as it's with that particular sauce.
They were off on a residential visit somewhere so meals were involved, so they started talking about their various fussy eating foibles. One said she couldn't eat steak, to which the teacher responded with admirable restraint 'It's OK, we're not having steak'.
Another was alarmed when she heard one of the meals would be spaghetti bolognese (or 'skabetti', as the teacher called it, which I always find an adorable pronunciation), because she doesn't like spaghetti. Fortunately for her, it turned out that the spaghetti to be used was in fact fusilli (the spiral one), which she did like. For me, spaghetti is specifically the long, thin, solid, cylindrical ones, and any other pasta shape has to be called by its own name (or just 'pasta'). But spag bol is special, because it's the pasta meal most British people encountered first, so it's kind of a meal in itself. I'm not quite sure how to describe its cultural role, actually, for people that don't already have the same cultural knowledge of it. I mean, Heinz sells it in tins, is probably the most meaningful thing I can tell you about it. So I suppose for her, spaghetti isn't a thing in its own right and it could be used as the generic term for pasta as long as it's with that particular sauce.
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| Tin of Heinz spaghetti bolognese |
Pasta words are one of those semantic fields where there's a lot of overlap and variation, by the way - 'noodles' for me has to be in an Asian dish, like chow mein, so even though they're long and thin, I couldn't call spaghetti noodles. For some people 'noodles' covers all kinds of pasta-type foods.
Thursday, 11 July 2019
Yo, Samity Sam!
Brilliantly, the tweet I am going to be famous for (at 200+ likes at the time of writing), is one in which I present myself as an idiot.
But here's the thing: I didn't interpret that first syllable as anything at all. 'Yo' wasn't specially in my vocabulary as a child in 1980s UK. So I just kind of heard it as a meaningless syllable. I'm not an acquisitionist so I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure this is NOT how language works. There are not meaningless syllables that consistently occur adjacent to a specific word. I should have definitely called on my pattern recognition skills and interpreted that sound as part of the name, or as being part of the phrase, as others did ('Yo!'). But I didn't.
Lane Greene said that American kids learnt how to pronounce 'Yosemite' because of the Looney Tunes cartoon character 'Yosemite Sam'. Despite plenty of exposure to this character, I did not similarly acquire the correct pronunciation of the word, because I interpreted the name as 'Sammity Sam', a sort of reduplicated nickname form of the name Sam. This is not unreasonable, as I'd not seen it written down and never heard of the place Yosemite. Other people did the same thing, and basically heard it as 'Yo, Sammity Sam'.My entire childhood I heard that character's name as "Sammity Sam", like some sort of cutesy reduplication.— Laura Bailey (@linguistlaura) July 10, 2019
But here's the thing: I didn't interpret that first syllable as anything at all. 'Yo' wasn't specially in my vocabulary as a child in 1980s UK. So I just kind of heard it as a meaningless syllable. I'm not an acquisitionist so I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure this is NOT how language works. There are not meaningless syllables that consistently occur adjacent to a specific word. I should have definitely called on my pattern recognition skills and interpreted that sound as part of the name, or as being part of the phrase, as others did ('Yo!'). But I didn't.
Wednesday, 19 June 2019
IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR
Hooray! Another article about how 'textspeak' is bad for kids is out! (Daily Mail link, so don't click it – you can get the idea from just reading this post.)
It's really a shame that the experts they asked were not experts in the thing they asked them about. They're experts in children's potential and curriculum development, both important things, but not actually language, which is the thing we're concerned about the harm of here. It seems comparable to asking experts in primary education if mobile phone masts are harming children's concentration or something. They'll have relevant things to say about concentration but they won't actually have the expertise to say if it's the mobile phone masts that are the problem.
Anyway I just came here to say this: IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR.
In the image above, Prof. Mellanby says 'these sentences do not contain grammar', of the following:
It's really a shame that the experts they asked were not experts in the thing they asked them about. They're experts in children's potential and curriculum development, both important things, but not actually language, which is the thing we're concerned about the harm of here. It seems comparable to asking experts in primary education if mobile phone masts are harming children's concentration or something. They'll have relevant things to say about concentration but they won't actually have the expertise to say if it's the mobile phone masts that are the problem.
Anyway I just came here to say this: IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR.
In the image above, Prof. Mellanby says 'these sentences do not contain grammar', of the following:
OMG ikrI'm just going to take the second one. It contains, among other things, the following grammar:
Yo dude r u still coming to party Friday
- a vocative (Yo dude)
- subject-verb agreement (r for 2nd person singular)
- question inversion (r u rather than u r)
- a verb phrase with a prepositional complement (to party) and adverbial (Friday)
- present tense (r rather than were)
- progressive aspect (coming)
- pre-verbal adverbial (still)
- knowledge of which words can be omitted in this context (the, on)
Tuesday, 11 June 2019
Southern privilege
One of my favourite writers is Justin Myers, who among other things writes The Guyliner. He reviews the Guardian Blind Date every week and I look forward to it eagerly. It's funny, but it's also clever and insightful and often poignant. This week, he threw in a comment about 'doing funny accents' that was so spot-on in its identification of the problem of centring privilege.
Just to take a step back: we normally think about male privilege, white privilege, or straight privilege. It doesn't meant that (say) men don't have problems, or never face discrimination, but that they don't face the kind of systematic discrimination that those who aren't men face, while of course they may face systematic discrimination of other kinds (e.g. you might be a gay man, or a black man, and have male privilege but not straight or white privilege). In the grand scheme of things, northerners aren't who you think of as facing the worst discrimination, but nevertheless, there is a sort of 'southern privilege'. (North and south here refer to England, by the way - in itself this minimises the existence of the other UK countries and especially Scotland.) This shows up mostly in accent discrimination, which can be a proxy for class discrimination.
Justin talks about the way that people frequently imitate a 'northern' accent when he tells them that he is from Yorkshire. (UGH by the way - 'the north' is a big place with a lot of different accents.) He specifically mentions the way that they say 'oop north', and the way they think this must pronounced like 'poop' because they don't realise it's just the vowel like in 'book' but written with a double 'o' to emphasise the difference from the southern pronunciation. And here comes the part that I'd never even thought about before, which is that having this special spelling to indicate the northern pronunciation is in itself a staggeringly southern-centric way of doing things. As Justin points out, there is no northern equivalent of an approximation of the southern pronunciation (he writes it as 'ap', which is pretty close to the IPA for the RP pronunciation). The word 'up' spells both the southern and the northern pronunciation; the letter 'u' represents both the sounds /ʌ/ and /ʊ/. To write 'up' as 'oop' leaves it as representing only the southern pronunciation, ignoring the northern one altogether.
In this situation, as always, the people in the position of relative power fix the language in a way that positions the less powerful ones as 'others', not the norm.
Just to take a step back: we normally think about male privilege, white privilege, or straight privilege. It doesn't meant that (say) men don't have problems, or never face discrimination, but that they don't face the kind of systematic discrimination that those who aren't men face, while of course they may face systematic discrimination of other kinds (e.g. you might be a gay man, or a black man, and have male privilege but not straight or white privilege). In the grand scheme of things, northerners aren't who you think of as facing the worst discrimination, but nevertheless, there is a sort of 'southern privilege'. (North and south here refer to England, by the way - in itself this minimises the existence of the other UK countries and especially Scotland.) This shows up mostly in accent discrimination, which can be a proxy for class discrimination.
Justin talks about the way that people frequently imitate a 'northern' accent when he tells them that he is from Yorkshire. (UGH by the way - 'the north' is a big place with a lot of different accents.) He specifically mentions the way that they say 'oop north', and the way they think this must pronounced like 'poop' because they don't realise it's just the vowel like in 'book' but written with a double 'o' to emphasise the difference from the southern pronunciation. And here comes the part that I'd never even thought about before, which is that having this special spelling to indicate the northern pronunciation is in itself a staggeringly southern-centric way of doing things. As Justin points out, there is no northern equivalent of an approximation of the southern pronunciation (he writes it as 'ap', which is pretty close to the IPA for the RP pronunciation). The word 'up' spells both the southern and the northern pronunciation; the letter 'u' represents both the sounds /ʌ/ and /ʊ/. To write 'up' as 'oop' leaves it as representing only the southern pronunciation, ignoring the northern one altogether.
In this situation, as always, the people in the position of relative power fix the language in a way that positions the less powerful ones as 'others', not the norm.
Friday, 17 May 2019
Unexpected adverbials
Liliane Haegeman has been here at Kent all week on an Erasmus teaching mobility visit. She's been giving four seminars on adverbial clauses, including among other things the difference between what she calls 'central' and 'peripheral' adverbial clauses. Central adverbials modify the event itself, so in this case the 'while' clause tells you the time during which the main event happened:
All of the above is paraphrasing what Liliane told us in the first seminar. She also said this this is something that you specifically have to tell learners of English, that they have to use present tense in this kind of clause. 'If' clauses are the same, in that they have two meanings:
Another example of the same thing is a little more complicated because you need to know about Dutch word order. Dutch has 'V2', which means that the finite verb is the second constituent in the clause. So it can look like English, where you have the subject, then the verb, then the object, or it can be some other part of the sentence before the verb, like the object or an adverbial clause like the ones we just talked about. Now here's the thing: only the central adverbials can be this first element before the verb. If it's the other kind, then it doesn't 'count' and you need something else to be there, like the subject. Look at this, where the verb is in bold (example from the seminar handout):
(NB: I've massively over-simplified this, and much of the week was spent learning how lots of this has interesting exceptions, and I've conflated two types of clause, etc etc. I've also paraphrased Liliane's work to write this, so consider this a citation.)
I took out the rubbish [while you were watching telly]
Peripheral adverbials, meanwhile, don't tell us about event time or anything like that, but are more about the relation between the clauses or speaker attitude. In this case, the 'while' clause gives a contrastive or concessive meaning:
I’m quite active, [while he is a total slob]
I'll take the rubbish out [while you watch telly]A peripheral (e.g. contrastive) adverbial with different tenses is interpreted as being two different times:
I was fortunate to get full funding for my degree, [while he has to borrow a student loan]The 'full funding' happened in the past (with past tense 'was') and the 'borrowing' is now (present tense 'has').
All of the above is paraphrasing what Liliane told us in the first seminar. She also said this this is something that you specifically have to tell learners of English, that they have to use present tense in this kind of clause. 'If' clauses are the same, in that they have two meanings:
If you don't understand this part, you won't be able to follow tomorrow's seminar. [if = condition]
If you didn't understand, why didn't you raise your hand and ask? [if = assumed background]The conditional one is the one where the tense should be present even if the main clause is future, as it is here. Then, at the end of the seminar, Liliane was talking about the following one the next day, and she said this:
Even if you won't come back to the class, you have the handout.For this to be a normal conditional, it needs to be present tense 'Even if you don't come back'. But Liliane used the future tense marker 'won't', and then all of a sudden it was forced into the assumed background interpretation: 'Even though I understand it's the case that you won't come back...' where the implication was that she knew that we wouldn't return, and so she had given us the handout, when in fact the meaning was that she thought we would but if we didn't, we had the handout.
Another example of the same thing is a little more complicated because you need to know about Dutch word order. Dutch has 'V2', which means that the finite verb is the second constituent in the clause. So it can look like English, where you have the subject, then the verb, then the object, or it can be some other part of the sentence before the verb, like the object or an adverbial clause like the ones we just talked about. Now here's the thing: only the central adverbials can be this first element before the verb. If it's the other kind, then it doesn't 'count' and you need something else to be there, like the subject. Look at this, where the verb is in bold (example from the seminar handout):
Dutch: [Als het je interesseert,] er zal in Parijs ook een vacature zijn.The 'if' clause is the kind that gives you background info, that doesn't count, so you have something else (the subject 'there') before the verb 'zal', which is now the third constituent. If you swap the order and have 'Als... zal er...', namely 'if... will there' where the 'if' clause is the one element before the verb in normal second position, it magically gets forced into the interpretation where the 'if' clause is a real conditional - the vacancy only exists if you're interested in it!
Word-for-word: If it you interests, there will in Paris also a vacancy be.
Idiomatically: 'If you are interested, in Paris there is also a vacancy.'
(NB: I've massively over-simplified this, and much of the week was spent learning how lots of this has interesting exceptions, and I've conflated two types of clause, etc etc. I've also paraphrased Liliane's work to write this, so consider this a citation.)
Monday, 13 May 2019
Ladies of science
The suffix -ist is added to a base to make a word that means 'someone who does something related to...', so an exorcist exorcises. It can mean someone who holds some belief system, so a Darwinist follows Darwin. And it can mean someone who practises some art or profession, so an etymologist studies etymology.
-ist is also helpfully gender-neutral, so it's never run into the same problems as -er/-(e)ress pairings like waiter/waitress, actor/actress. I learnt the other day that it was in fact invented specifically to refer to a woman, Mary Somerville, joint first female member of the Royal Academy, because she couldn't be called a 'man of science'.
I'm pleased they went with this and not 'lady of science' or something.
Vaguely relatedly, there's a really nice essay by Laurie Bauer on why linguists are not called linguisticians, with some interesting insights on the connotations of each suffix (-ician was 'trivialising' at the time the words were being coined).
-ist is also helpfully gender-neutral, so it's never run into the same problems as -er/-(e)ress pairings like waiter/waitress, actor/actress. I learnt the other day that it was in fact invented specifically to refer to a woman, Mary Somerville, joint first female member of the Royal Academy, because she couldn't be called a 'man of science'.
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| Caption from exhibit at Turner Contemporary, saying that 'scientist' was first used to describe Mary Somerville |
I'm pleased they went with this and not 'lady of science' or something.
Vaguely relatedly, there's a really nice essay by Laurie Bauer on why linguists are not called linguisticians, with some interesting insights on the connotations of each suffix (-ician was 'trivialising' at the time the words were being coined).
Tuesday, 7 May 2019
Toilet flushing instructions and recursive binary Merge
Spotted in the Duke of Cumberland loos in Whitstable this weekend, this instruction on how to flush the toilet:
I interpret this as two instructions:
The way that this is broken down into two phrases can be seen as support for the idea that syntax comprises a series of operations of recursive binary Merge. That's a technical way of saying that sentences are formed by combining two elements at a time, and combining the resulting component with a new element, still two at a time.
So, for example, we might think of a sentence like Birds eat seeds as being formed as follows:
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| Press hard Both buttons |
PRESS HARD. BOTH BUTTONS.You could read it as a single instruction ('Press hard both buttons') but it's awkward in English. It would be normal in, say, Spanish, but in English a more idiomatic word order is 'Press both buttons hard', or verb (press) – object (both buttons) – adverb (hard).
The way that this is broken down into two phrases can be seen as support for the idea that syntax comprises a series of operations of recursive binary Merge. That's a technical way of saying that sentences are formed by combining two elements at a time, and combining the resulting component with a new element, still two at a time.
So, for example, we might think of a sentence like Birds eat seeds as being formed as follows:
eat + seeds --> eat seedsOur loo-flushing example is a little bit more complicated. We don't have a subject, because it's an instruction so there is an implicit 'you' as the presser of the buttons. We definitely want to say that both buttons is a unit (a 'constituent'), which seems intuitively right (there are also ways to test this kind of thing). Then we want to say that Press both buttons is a constituent, with the verb press combining with its object both buttons. Then we would combine that whole phrase press both buttons with the adverb hard, telling us how the action of pressing both buttons should be performed. This makes more sense than saying that the verb press combines with a constituent both buttons hard, which doesn't seem intuitively right. Adverbs tell us how verbs are done, not what nouns are like. So now we have this structure:
birds + eat seeds --> birds eat seeds
both + buttons --> both buttonsThe fact that the adverb refers to the verb, and not to the noun, also tells us why we get the broken-up instructions in the photo. The adverb, as I said, refers to the verb. We interpret it as referring to the whole verb phrase press both buttons as the thing that has to be done in a hard manner, but in fact it's really the pressing that is to be hard. The whole phrase involves the three levels of recursive Merge (recombining constituents) shown above, giving a final nested structure like this:
press + both buttons --> press both buttons
press both buttons + hard --> press both buttons hard
[3 [2 press [1 both buttons 1] 2] hard 3]If we want to make it much simpler, one way of doing that is to remove the recursive part of the operation, and have things combine just once. This means, if you assume that Merge is binary (that things can only combine two at a time and not three or more), that the maximum number of words you can have in an utterance is two. And that's exactly what is happening in the photo: two pairs of words (both buttons; press hard), and their juxtaposition is what tells us that one applies to the other rather than their syntactic combination.
Tuesday, 30 April 2019
yeet
You might have noticed that people yeet things now. It's a specific type of throwing. Here's a helpful hint I saw on twitter this week:
Until as recently as January, I thought there was a regional difference in this word. The American Dialect Society had it as one of their Words of 2018, but with the meaning 'indication of surprise or excitement' - an exclamation. It was said to be onomatopoeic, the sound of yeeting something into a bin or whatever and 'pronounced with a celebratory gesture'.
Urban dictionary seems to have only the exclamation in the older entries (though still accompanying the yeeting action of course). And as with so many new words, it may well come from black American pop culture, originating or possibly just finding new life in a dance.
I don't know if the two senses have always been available to everyone and it was just different bits of them got out into the mainstream, or if they've converged more recently. And I am FULLY aware of how painfully white and middle-aged and out of touch I sound just writing this post.
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| 'Yoink' is the opposite of 'yeet' |
Urban dictionary seems to have only the exclamation in the older entries (though still accompanying the yeeting action of course). And as with so many new words, it may well come from black American pop culture, originating or possibly just finding new life in a dance.
It may well have been onomatopoeic over here as well, but it was very definitely a verb of throwing, not an exclamation. What's more, because of its similarity to our Germanic-origin irregular verbs, it's got a past tense of yote and takes part in wordplay like yeeteth in the tweet above (see also twote for the past tense of tweet).
I don't know if the two senses have always been available to everyone and it was just different bits of them got out into the mainstream, or if they've converged more recently. And I am FULLY aware of how painfully white and middle-aged and out of touch I sound just writing this post.
Wednesday, 24 April 2019
Who run(s) the world?
Which of the following is correct?
(1) Who runs the world? Girls!
(2) Who run the world? Girls!
If your judgements match mine, you picked (1). But if you think about it, that's really weird. And it seems like at least some people find both of them OK. The two options are illustrated in these images that I collected within a day or so of each other without even looking for them:
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| Who run the world? Girls |
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| Who runs the world? [Image of a woman with a toddler, both raising their hands] |
(3) Girls run the worldThe reason (4) is ungrammatical (that's what the asterisk means) is because it has a plural subject (girls) and singular agreement on the verb (runs, rather than run).
(4) *Girls runs the world
To go back to our original examples, who doesn't have any information about whether it refers to a singular or a plural subject. It could be either, and (5), with a singular referent for who, is just as good as (1), where the referent is the plural girls.
(5) Who runs the world? Mark Zuckerberg.So that explains why it can cause either singular or plural agreement to appear on the verb.
And although I find it more natural with singular agreement, you can easily nudge it towards the plural agreement if there's a clear expectation that the answer is plural, such as if you know that the answer is either boys or girls, and you've forgotten which.
(6) Remind me, who did you say run the world?And that just leaves us with one mop-up, which is to say that the default if you don't have any information about number is to use the singular. That fits with the general principle that singular is the unmarked form: languages usually have some way of marking things as plural, not singular, just like English using -s for plurals and nothing for singular nouns (girl vs girls).
Monday, 11 February 2019
Don't touch the actors and they won't touch you
The 'normal' way of making a conditional in English is with an 'if'-clause:
If you hurry up, we'll be in time for the train.There are plenty of others too, of course (As long as you keep walking, we'll be in time for the train) and of course -- isn't it always -- it's much more complicated than this, but there's also a cool way of doing conditionals with and and or.
We'll be in time for the train if you hurry up.
Consider this warning, which I saw at Dreamland in Margate at their Screamland Hallowe'en thing a couple of years ago:
Don't touch the actors and they won't touch you.
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| Poster for 'Screamland' in Margate |
But we're funny things, humans, always looking for connections, patterns, reasons, and causes. Those two things being joined makes us want to think that there is some meaningful link between them. It's like if someone says The car is making a funny noise and Jen borrowed it yesterday. You can be pretty sure they're blaming Jen for the funny noise the car is making, and not just telling you two unrelated facts about the car.
Generally, in an and sentence, both bits are the same type: both statements, for instance, in which case they must both be true (so for the sentence about the car to be true, it must be true that it's making a funny noise and that Jen borrowed it -- notice that the inferred link that Jen was to blame does not have to be true). Or they might both be instructions, in which case you're expected to obey both (at the same time or in order), as in Sit down and shut up. Our example sentence, about the actors, is a mix of an instruction and a statement. So we might be expected to obey the instruction and for the statement to be true. I don't know about you but I don't really know where I stand right now, as there is no obvious link between my obedience and objective truth.
It would make so much more sense if, say, the truth of the statement was conditional on me obeying the instruction. So if I don't touch the actors (obey the instruction), then it will be true that they don't touch me. And all of a sudden, we have a conditional like the 'if'-clause type I mentioned right at the top, but with and instead.
Can we do it with or, a disjunction? Well, yes we can, but it comes out as a warning or threat rather than a deal or an agreement.
Don't bother the tigers, or they'll attack you.Now, we still have to obey the instruction but if we don't, then the second part will be true: a punishment, rather than a reward for our obedience.
We can even do it with neither at all, just so long as it is a proper threat and not just a warning:
Touch my stuff, I'll beat you up.Now the instruction is an elliptical conditional. There's probably an understood 'If you' at the beginning, or else the link between the parts is the same as with and: if the first part is 'obeyed' (the person does carry out the action), then the second part is true.
Monday, 4 February 2019
Even if it were true (but it's not)
On a recent episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage, they were talking about numbers. One of them stated something or other, I forget what - I think it was about babies being aware of different numbers - and another responded by saying
But this is precisely where it is useful if you want to give a sick burn in the most understated way imaginable. You see, your subjunctive is used for counterfactuals: situations that are not currently true. So by using it you get to say 'I do not believe that this is true', at precisely the same time as you are saying with your actual words 'This might be true' (=if this is true). oof.
...that's controversial. And even if it were true...Language pedants get a lot of mileage out of bemoaning the loss of the subjunctive. The subjunctive is not really much of a thing in English, but we see remnants of it in set phrases like Long live the king, where the meaning expresses a hope or a wish. It's just the bare form of the verb, and it's used in hypothetical situations. We often don't use it nowadays, apart from in quite formal registers. It's not that important because we have other ways of signalling the same thing.
But this is precisely where it is useful if you want to give a sick burn in the most understated way imaginable. You see, your subjunctive is used for counterfactuals: situations that are not currently true. So by using it you get to say 'I do not believe that this is true', at precisely the same time as you are saying with your actual words 'This might be true' (=if this is true). oof.
Sunday, 27 January 2019
"George Osborne and Tony Blair resemble the Kray brothers"
That surprising claim comes to you direct from the Dean of the University of Buckingham school of education, Barnaby Lenon. I've cut it down slightly - you might think he was perhaps referring to their perceived criminality, but no, it's their accents he is talking about.
It's been a while since I've heard the term Estuary English. It's the kind of English that people speak all over the southeast of England. Jamie Oliver, for instance, speaks the Essex variety. We don't tend to hear it called that so much any more because you really only need a term for an accent when you're singling it out for some reason, for criticism for example, and lately (now that the speakers of Estuary English are the ones making the criticism) people's critical attentions have turned to what the young people are speaking, which is not Estuary English.
So now who is speaking it, if not those damned teenagers? Well, Tony Blair, George Osborne, and Prince William, it seems. Yep, he who ought to be speaking the Queen's English is "lapsing" into Estuary English, according to Barnaby.
He seems to be commenting on research by someone else, Graeme Davis, who has been quote-bundled into this article in a way that conflates his findings with Lenon's, which may well not be terribly accurate. Davis says that we are seeing levelling, which is when different accents become more similar to each other and 'posher' accents become less 'posh' to fit in a bit more. This is a well-known and not very news-worthy finding, but it is true at least. As Lenon says:
But he also says:
Really, what's going on here is that Davis has found that prep school boys' accents have continued the trend we've been seeing for many decades of becoming less distinct from a more everyday middle class English, features of which are shared among many varieties (glottal stops for 't', for instance). Essentially, RP is no longer so distinct from the other Englishes spoken in the London area, and has been on this path for many years. Politicians and young royals no longer get so much benefit from the authority conferred by a posh accent, and gain more benefit from being relatable (perhaps - Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson et al still play on the private-school vibe). So far so expected. Then this chap in his new job (mis-)interprets this research for a splash and uses a term that was derogatory in the 00s to spark the old 'mockney'-bashers' ire, and makes a daft claim that doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny.
It's been a while since I've heard the term Estuary English. It's the kind of English that people speak all over the southeast of England. Jamie Oliver, for instance, speaks the Essex variety. We don't tend to hear it called that so much any more because you really only need a term for an accent when you're singling it out for some reason, for criticism for example, and lately (now that the speakers of Estuary English are the ones making the criticism) people's critical attentions have turned to what the young people are speaking, which is not Estuary English.
So now who is speaking it, if not those damned teenagers? Well, Tony Blair, George Osborne, and Prince William, it seems. Yep, he who ought to be speaking the Queen's English is "lapsing" into Estuary English, according to Barnaby.
He seems to be commenting on research by someone else, Graeme Davis, who has been quote-bundled into this article in a way that conflates his findings with Lenon's, which may well not be terribly accurate. Davis says that we are seeing levelling, which is when different accents become more similar to each other and 'posher' accents become less 'posh' to fit in a bit more. This is a well-known and not very news-worthy finding, but it is true at least. As Lenon says:
It is very important when you are with non-Etonians to try to conceal that you are an Etonian. They do not want to appear to be upper-class because being upper-class these days is not a good thing. If you are in politics, for instance, you want to appear to be a man of the people.Sure. Right now, populism is in. It's good to look like you're a man of the people. (You're totally screwed if you're a woman, by the way - no such thing as a woman of the people.)
But he also says:
George Osborne and Tony Blair are both prone to lapse into estuary English so they resemble the Kray brothers rather more than the private school background they come from. Remember the Old Etonian Prince William saying: ‘I need to check this with the missus.’I mean, the Kray twins didn't have terribly pronounced features of Cockney but they did not sound like George Osborne. There's clips of them talking on YouTube. You can go and listen to them. They're just not the same.
I would say that most Etonians and Harrovians these days go out of their way to employ an estuary accent.Those poor old Etonians and Harrovians, held back by their posh accents, disguising them to try to fit in and get on in life.
Really, what's going on here is that Davis has found that prep school boys' accents have continued the trend we've been seeing for many decades of becoming less distinct from a more everyday middle class English, features of which are shared among many varieties (glottal stops for 't', for instance). Essentially, RP is no longer so distinct from the other Englishes spoken in the London area, and has been on this path for many years. Politicians and young royals no longer get so much benefit from the authority conferred by a posh accent, and gain more benefit from being relatable (perhaps - Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson et al still play on the private-school vibe). So far so expected. Then this chap in his new job (mis-)interprets this research for a splash and uses a term that was derogatory in the 00s to spark the old 'mockney'-bashers' ire, and makes a daft claim that doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny.
Monday, 21 January 2019
Have you eaten Grandma? (review)
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| Cover of 'Have you eaten Grandma?' by Gyles Brandreth |
I was considering writing a review of this book, Have you eaten Grandma? by Gyles Brandreth, but to be quite honest it's not worth bothering.
[Edit: I ended up writing a review of it anyway so here you go.]
It's neither surprisingly good nor toe-curlingly awful. I got it for professional purposes (I'm teaching a module on 'Grammar for Everyone' this term and want to look at all sorts of books that claim to be about 'grammar') and I'll get something out of it for that, I suppose, but I'm glad I didn't buy it for pleasure.
I had been ready to be cross about it after seeing this little video in which Gyles (known as being a pedant, has done truly awfully smug programmes about language in the past) talks about some of his 'bugbears' including redundant myself, can I get rather than may I get, and so on. In fact, it's exactly what you expect.
The majority of it is punctuation advice. It's fine, with only a few mistakes, but Eats, Shoots and Leaves is better if that's what you want. Then there's lists of words, either just ones he likes or ones that people often get wrong in writing (accept vs except, for instance) and mnemonics (sometimes very weird ones) to help remember them.
He has a bizarre joy in some -- but not all -- neologisms. He seems to have (like Stephen Fry) come around from pure prescriptivism to the joys of what he calls 'slang' some time in the 1990s, and so he loves things from then. He's constantly saying End of, for example, like at the end of the video above. He gives a long list of initialisms like WTF (which he loves) and describes some of them as being of 'the Whatsapp and Snapchat generation', which needless to say were totally unfamiliar to the teenager I asked. And yet he is so rigidly inflexible about some things that he was taught were correct, and so are immutable rules for him (you mustn't ever, ever say bored of, for example, despite the fact that there's no harm in it whatsoever and millions of people do say it).
There's an embarrassing section of the abbreviations part where he talks about labels for gender and sexuality that verge on poking fun at LGBTQIA-type initialisms. He shows a clear support for non-binary, non-straight identification, but still betrays an opinion of 'simply straight' being 'normal' and 'knowing where you are'. The section on American vs British English is terrible, and relies only the books of people like him, not linguists. This is not a book that seeks to promote truth.
This is very evident throughout, when he often refers to 'the Brandreth Rule' on particular points. This means that he knows that there are different ways of doing things, and his arbitrary choice is the one he likes the best. That's what this book is. It's for people aged about 50 or 60, who 'love the English language', and just want someone who agrees with them to reinforce their opinions and tell them the things they already know so that they can be smug about knowing them. I've come to realise that anyone who says they 'love the English language' doesn't really love the English language, not as it really is. They love some idealised version of it, the version they speak, the version they think is 'best', and which is being 'corrupted' by Americans, kids, foreigners, or modern education.
It's a perfectly acceptable, slightly dull book. If you want to learn some stuff about punctuation or commonly confused words, then it's one way of doing that (but not the best way). If you just want an authority to refer to on certain style points, it'll do that (but there are better authorities to refer to). It's not the best of any of the things it does, but it is by Gyles Brandreth, and that is its selling point. End of. (Sorry, that was such a lazy way to end this but I couldn't resist.)
Monday, 14 January 2019
Upstarting
We were in Brussels just before Christmas for a little holiday, and we visited a couple of lambic breweries while we were there. One of the brewers at Verzet was great and took the time to show us all round it and tell us loads about the process and their beers.
He was talking about the background of the guys who work there, and he said at one point that one of them helped upstarting a brewery, meaning 'helped to start up' a brewery.
In Flemish, there are what's called 'separable verbs'. These correspond to English verbs that have a preposition-like particle as part of it, so in this case start up. The Dutch version is opstarten. You can see that the 'up' part is a prefix, so it's literally 'upstart'. Flemish does have the option of separating that prefix from the main bit of the verb, more like the English equivalent, but it doesn't always separate (based on some rules of what kind of sentence it is). You can see that he basically just anglicised the word (it's called a 'calque' when this happens).
An interesting aside: I say Dutch in the paragraph above because that's what Google Translate has, and I think that the Dutch of Flanders is not different in this respect. Where there is a difference, according to this site,* is exactly when you separate the verb. The verb remains joined together when it's the only verb in the clause, it seems. When there's another verb, as in our sentence (He helped to start up a brewery), it's more likely to be separated in the Netherlands (he helped to start a brewery up) and more likely to remain intact in Flanders (he helped to upstart a brewery).
*If you, like me, like reading about grammar, this seems to be a really comprehensive grammar of Dutch that you can download as a PDF.
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| Some of the barrels at the Verzet brewery (named after their music heroes) |
He was talking about the background of the guys who work there, and he said at one point that one of them helped upstarting a brewery, meaning 'helped to start up' a brewery.
In Flemish, there are what's called 'separable verbs'. These correspond to English verbs that have a preposition-like particle as part of it, so in this case start up. The Dutch version is opstarten. You can see that the 'up' part is a prefix, so it's literally 'upstart'. Flemish does have the option of separating that prefix from the main bit of the verb, more like the English equivalent, but it doesn't always separate (based on some rules of what kind of sentence it is). You can see that he basically just anglicised the word (it's called a 'calque' when this happens).
An interesting aside: I say Dutch in the paragraph above because that's what Google Translate has, and I think that the Dutch of Flanders is not different in this respect. Where there is a difference, according to this site,* is exactly when you separate the verb. The verb remains joined together when it's the only verb in the clause, it seems. When there's another verb, as in our sentence (He helped to start up a brewery), it's more likely to be separated in the Netherlands (he helped to start a brewery up) and more likely to remain intact in Flanders (he helped to upstart a brewery).
*If you, like me, like reading about grammar, this seems to be a really comprehensive grammar of Dutch that you can download as a PDF.
Monday, 7 January 2019
Omni rage
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| Image of a facebook post describing a satirical rant as 'omni Greggs rage' |
Omni is a prefix most of the time. It means 'every', like in omnivorous. Prefixes can cut loose from their roots if they're typically used in one specific word, or if the free version has just one meaning. So, for instance, cis means cisgender because we don't really use cis for much else (though we could - cisalpine is a word, though not a common one, meaning 'on this side of the Alps', where 'this side' means with respect to Rome - it's a Latin thing). So cis has specialised into this one meaning. Other gender- or sexuality-related prefixes have similarly gained independence, so you can describe yourself as bi, meaning bisexual, even though we have the bi- prefix in loads of words (bicycle, biped, biennial). It's just with that one meaning that it can be used solo.
I checked Urban Dictionary for omni and quite frankly didn't understand most of the definitions, so I'm not totally sure what's going on here. I didn't find anything that suggested it's used alone in the omnishambles sense but that really does look like what it might be. Omni rage as a term for that pure, hysterical rage as displayed by Malcolm Tucker in full flow?
(If you're not in the UK you'll have no idea what anything in the facebook post is about but don't worry about it; it's just the latest nonsense. Basically, professional moron Piers Morgan threw a hissy fit about 'snowflakes' when Greggs started doing vegan sausage rolls and people were quick to point out the irony of his rage about something so harmless.)
Wednesday, 2 January 2019
pseudo-names
Family members have names, obviously, but they also have sort of pseudo-names - the kinship terms we call them like 'Mum'. I've actually always called my parents by their first names and also my maternal grandparents, who I always called Paul and Rosemary. My paternal grandparents, on the other hand, are Grandma and Grandad.
Now these kinship terms are normal nouns when you're talking about them, and occur with a determiner (usually a possessive determiner, as in my mum). When you're using them as a term of address, though, they work like a name. So just as you don't say the Louise or my Jane, you just say plain Grandma when you're talking to them as opposed to about them.
It turns out that I have inadequately acquired the rules about this. When I'm talking about my grandma, I'll often refer to her just as 'Grandma'. So I'll say something like Grandma sent us a Christmas card today. This apparently sounds a bit odd and I should say My grandma sent us a Christmas card today in order not to sound like she's also the grandma of the person I'm talking to. I think that because all my other relatives just have names, I treat 'Grandma' as her name and use it accordingly: compare Rosemary sent us a Christmas card today, which is totally normal.
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